and we'll get started into introductions. Okay, so my name is Summer Perry. I'm gonna be moderating this webinar today on how to employ AI in 2024. This is part of a three series webinar that NAPFA is putting on. And I'm really excited for today's panelists to dive into this. You have kind of a very broad level of expertise and also just area of expertise is really diverse today. But I'll introduce myself. Like I said, my name is Summer. I'm a certified financial planner based here in New York City. And I have really enjoyed my career getting started off so far and have enjoyed working for a fee only financial planning company. So I'll go ahead and start with some introductions of my panelists. So Justin, if we can start with you and then John and Dan, if you can just tell us why you're here and kind of what brought you to being a panelist today. Sure, Summer. Yeah, thank you. So passion for operations and feeling that AI is kind of the next milestone that in our industry will kind of catapult things. So happy to speak there on that topic. But a little bit about my background. I've been in the industry since 2001, started in a wire house and broke away around 2013 and been in the RIA space only since. Practicing financial planner, maintain my CFP and some clients, but also over the years, I've had various stints in the management with hybrid firms, RIAs, mainly in the operations section. So currently a partner at an SEC registered advisory firm and focus more on the operations side. And in particular also have a consultancy for AI and a strategic advisor for a couple of small FinTech startups. Yeah, very cool. Such a wide array of experience. John, tell us a little bit about you. Sure, I'm John O'Connell. I'm the CEO of the Oasis Group. I actually started my career as a developer a billion years ago. And then from there I moved into sales. I've been a CEO or a COO for a couple of global publicly traded companies, did a couple of startup companies, sold two of them, took one public. I've been in the financial services industry either as a consumer when I worked at Merrill Lynch many times or as a provider when I worked at companies like Oracle or Sybase. Created the Oasis Group in 2019 and we're a FinTech consultancy firm that helps registered investment advisors or independent broker dealers and asset managers to select technology. So we have a cybersecurity division, we have a data division, we have an AI division and we have a advisor technology division. So we do consulting around AI. Really excited to be here and talk about some of the tools we use internally at the Oasis Group and what do we recommend for clients? Yeah, no, you're a great candidate for this type of discussion. So thanks for sharing. Dan, we'll turn it over to you. Thank you, Summer. My name is Dan Solon. I'm the founder and president of Evidence-Based Advisor Marketing. We're a digital marketing firm that serves only registered investment advisors. We have a broad range of services from websites to producing videos. We consult on both the technical and non-technical aspects of AI, but my own experience with AI is really self-taught because you cannot market an advisory firm these days without being conversant with at least the basic AI programs. Just quickly, my background is I was a trial lawyer in New York City for many years. And then after I retired from the practice of law, I was a financial advisor with several large firms. First, my own firm that merged into a large firm, and then I went with another large firm. And then I became an author and have written six books on investing, two self-help books, and I have a new book for millennials coming out next month. Very cool. Thank you so much. That's helpful, I think, for everyone listening to kind of hear the background. And I'm excited to dive in a little bit more and hear a bit about your expertise in the field of AI. And I forgot here to go through a little bit about logistics and reminders. So I'll get to this really quick before we get started. So today, like I mentioned, we're gonna be talking about how to employ AI in 2024. And then as part of our webinar series with NAPA, we have one more component of this AI series, and it will be held on April 24th. That's all things compliance. So that's important. We're gonna talk about today, employing AI, but we obviously have some guardrails in the financial industry. So we'll get into that next time. And then this is a slide I was supposed to be on, but these are our panelists. We're excited to hear from them. Today, and I just wanted to kind of show a quick outline of what we're gonna be talking about. So we're gonna go through some basic tools that are available through artificial intelligence, getting more out of the tools, perhaps tools you haven't tried if you're a financial advisor and then we'll have some prompts and templates to show. And then also be aware of the Q&A feature here in Zoom. If you have questions, please use them or please put them into the Q&A function and we'll get to those. So I think without further ado, I wanna start off with our first question. So let's talk about the basic AI tools that exist today. What tools are you all seeing and using most commonly and just in general? Can we touch on that and whoever wants to go first? Well, I'll jump in first. So a lot of the tools that we're using are really to try to help speed up our delivery process. A lot of times we don't have enormous amounts of time to be able to spend on some of our marketing materials. So what we try to do is leverage AI around that. So we offer a training program as well as part of the Oasis Group. So I have access to Kajabi. It's a system that houses our training program. We use the Creator Hub in Kajabi quite a bit. We can record a video, upload that video to Kajabi and it will generate marketing materials based on that video, it'll generate up to 24 pieces of content to 24 pieces of marketing material. It'll generate the transcript, it'll help to edit it, it'll clean up the sound of the video. So that's a huge time saver for us. We also use quite a bit of Jasper AI. Most people use ChatGPT. ChatGPT is pretty good, but Jasper AI for long form content is fantastic. So a lot of times what we'll do is we'll put an outline into Jasper or we'll use Jasper to generate an outline for us. So that's been very helpful for us on our newsletter. We publish a newsletter every month. We've got about 20,000 people that subscribe to it. So Jasper is a huge leg up when we're trying to put together the outlines for the next, the monthly newsletter. Would you say Jasper is that alternative to ChatGPT or do they serve two different purposes? It's definitely an alternative to ChatGPT. One of the things that I find with Jasper that over ChatGPT is Jasper will learn your voice. So for example, if you've got a specific writing style, the more you write with Jasper, the more you correct it, it learns your writing style. So as an example, if you wanted an informative and helpful style, you can feed text into it and it will generate an informative and kind of helpful style. Then over time, it will literally create a style like this is John's style or this is the Oasis group style of writing. You cannot do that with ChatGPT very easily because it's kind of made for a generic skill set or a generic set of use cases. So it doesn't really capture your voice as much as you would like. And there was a question that came up about Kajabi. It's K-A-J-A-B-I is Kajabi. And Jasper is J-A-S-P-E-R.AI. And just to note on that, we'll also have a list of resources provided with the webinar that have a little more detail about these. So don't feel like you have to be rushed to write everything down, but thank you so much for that synopsis on Jasper and Kajabi, that's great. Justin or Dan, did you have anything to add? What are you using and seeing in the financial services industry? Yeah, I'll chime in just to kind of double click on John's thoughts about content creation. That's a big focus for an advisor's life is creating meaningful content to put in front of their clients. So yeah, that's an everyday tool for us in our firm. We've created kind of our own custom content creator to achieve that. And there's a lot of really nice tools out there for making client engagements like meetings more impactful. So those are some nice tools and they're continuing to evolve in that space. That's kind of from the advisor's hat, my operations hat. One thing that I'm using just about every day is AI when it comes to training and operations support. So every task, AI can help to develop, streamline, guardrails for task management. So much quicker than we could do on our own. So yeah, that's another task or activity that's probably on an everyday on our plate. Is there a specific AI tool you use for a task manager or is something in-house? Yeah, so we've built our own tools with that, but we have co-pilot for like our internal meetings. So setting any meetings for training, it's easy for us to turn that into kind of a task document so that these could be delegated and assigned to other people. And we see consistency with how that task is being performed because every task now can be delineated and you would create that much, much quicker through AI. Very cool. And you said that's called co-pilot is what you use for meetings, is that right? Yeah, so co-pilot is Microsoft's chat GPT and language turnkey. Cool, okay, that's helpful. Yeah, thank you for sharing. Dan, did you wanna type in as well? Yeah, let me just round out the various content marketing platforms. We have a very large SEO practice for advisors and we partner with a firm called Gemsu that does the backend of SEO. But our job is to provide two original 750 word blogs compliance ready for every client. So that's actually how I got into AI because as that practice took off, we immediately almost ran out of capacity to generate that volume of blogs. So I currently use, and this is a recent transition, I was using chat GPT, but I currently use Claude which I find is a better writer. I'm a writer and I find Claude is a better writer. And to John's point, one of the things that has helped enormously is I was able to upload samples of my writing to Claude and have it create a style guide. So every time now when I ask it to do a blog, I make as part of the prompt, the style guide, and I keep refining the style guide to make it more and more refined. And as a consequence, I'm getting to the point where I really don't have to edit very much the output of Claude. It's actually been astounding in the last, say two months. Now I have the advanced Claude, which is 20 bucks a month but well worth it. So I would say when we get to a point where the AI platforms can hyperlink to relevant facts which we're required to do in order for two reasons, we have to be sure that the facts that AI is generating are really facts, not hallucinations. And secondly, compliance requires that. But I think we're gonna be at a point in the very near future where advisors can do what we're doing themselves if they wish. And the second thing that's been very exciting for us, we help advisors market and we understand the power of video. Video historically has been very expensive to produce. You need a team, you need people traveling, sending out a week. And we have historically produced those kinds of video for high-end websites. But now using programs like Pictory AI and there are many other text to video programs, we can shoot some B-roll, I don't wanna bore you with details, but we can shoot some B-roll, customize a very cost-effective but highly personal video. We can even do things like for my book, my social media marketing team wanted 60 videos. And I told them there was no way we could produce 60 videos producing them professionally would be exorbitantly expensive. The amount of time would take forever. So we ended up producing an avatar of me. We also can do a voice avatar. So now I can, I generated 60 videos in one week. All I do is the scripts and I just got a metrics report. You may find this interesting this morning. I did shoot some of the real me videos and we compared the metrics of the real me to the avatar. And the avatar had three times the engagement of the real me. I'm not sure that's a compliment, but nevertheless, it's a testament to where the technology is headed. So it's really exciting what you can do now. Yeah, wow. That's very fascinating. And I watched the avatar videos and I had no idea they were avatars. So it's really mind blowing to see how things are changing. So we've talked a lot about all these tools and just for context, a lot of the financial advisors on this call today, this is the first time they're hearing some of these technologies, including myself. So the different, all the different avenues that AI has now. So can we talk a little bit more low level, like what platforms are already using AI that we're familiar with? I know maybe LinkedIn or Canva, Morningstar, those types of things. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I can start off if that's okay. I mean, I just spoke about AI at the advise on conference. So your clients may use advise on as a tool as their wealth management platform. You know, advise on, when you think about how to save time as an advisor, right? Some of it is just navigating the client records to be able to do some work, right? So a good example of that is, if you wanted to go look at the last time that Summer took an RMD, right? You're gonna basically navigate to the household that Summer's in and then navigate to Summer as a client and then navigate to the account that Summer takes her RMDs out of, and then go try to look up the last time Summer took an RMD. Well, think of some of these search capabilities that are now not using natural language processing. I could type in a search bar, show me the last time Summer Perry took an RMD and how much was it? And AI will go churn through the data and just simply bring you directly to the screen that has that information on it, right? And there are a variety of these firms that are putting these capabilities in. So advise on is one example. You know, Orion has definitely been working on some of their AI, Advisor Engine's been working on some of this. But if you think about the amount of time that it can save, even in training, right? Justin will probably comment on this from an operations perspective, but training a new operations person, how to navigate that software can be rather long and it's going to take them a while to generate that proficiency. If they have the ability to simply ask in a natural language way, questions to the software just in the search bar and the software were to return the appropriate result, it's going to save a ton of time, training these people and getting them productive. So that's just one example of where we're seeing AI being incorporated even in the tools that advisors have on their desktops today. And if they're not aware of that, they really should talk to their current vendors and get an idea of what are you doing in AI so they can begin to understand, how do I use this in my practice and what's it going to mean to me? Yeah, absolutely. It's probably exists already in several different technologies that we use. I mean, as working as an advisor, use so many different technologies, and maybe there's things I'm missing that AI is already employing here. Before we have the rest of you answer or comment, if you'd like, we had a question, what is the AI video creation tool that Dan used? They missed the name of it. So Dan, can you tell us the name of that? The one I use is pictory.ai. It's one of many, I'm not saying it's the best one, it's just the one we started using. But if you're interested in where video is headed, if you just Google Soya, S-O-Y-A, and look at what's coming out in the next month or two from OpenAI, where you can say, just simply type in, give me a Western scene from 1910, and you just see a Western scene. I mean, it's absolutely incredible. It's so incredible that Tyler Perry, the filmmaker, put a hold on an $800 million studio expansion, because he said he doesn't think he needs it given this new technology. So that's the one we use. Thank you. Appreciate that. Justin, did you want to comment at all on AI we're already seeing used in this space? Yeah. No, I think John hit some of the tools that advisors are hitting a lot with most in their practice, but some of just general office tools, kind of to your point, like low-level things, you're seeing that incorporated into Office, Microsoft Office, so it can be built in. So if you use a lot of PowerPoint and Word documents, those can be attached in there as well, and kind of even scan through some of your files to provide examples for ideas for the next draft. So even within Office, but some of you may be using Zapier just for some automation, right? So Zapier's got some nice AI tools integrated in there as well, and that's a cost-effective way to start automating things like emails and different processes. Yeah, that's great. I think, too, a common one I've heard is Grammarly when writing emails, and that's using AI. Don't ask me the technology or how it works, but I know it's AI. I've heard that around, so Dan, did you want to say something? So you kind of stole my thunder, Summer. I'm sorry. I was going to say the very underappreciated AI is Grammarly. Grammarly historically was, oh, I'll correct your spelling and I'll fix your grammar, but Grammarly, like when I have a Word document up, Grammarly is built into that. It's built into all of my programs, like my email and virtually everything, Grammarly pops up. But the beauty of Grammarly when I'm doing Word is, let's say I'm stuck on, I'm looking at a draft and I want to define what a stock is. I just go to the lower right-hand corner and say, what is the stock? And it then produces a paragraph on what is a stock. I copy it, paste it into the Word document. So Grammarly is a, you really cannot, it's almost like being writing malpractice to be a writer and not use Grammarly. I mean, that's how, and it's, I now have the new beta. I was a beta person for Grammarly and the new version is, it's just absolutely sensational. There are two others that I use that I think you might find interesting. One is a program called Consensus AI, and I'm a researcher, I'm a researcher and a writer. So I'm always looking for support. To me, a fact is not a fact unless it can be hyperlinked to a credible source. So historically, it's very difficult to find that you could do a standard Google search, but you can use a program built into ChatGPT, by the way, under Explore ChatGPT called Consensus.AI. And you can say to Consensus AI, are there any studies on the pros and cons of factor-based investing? And Consensus AI will take a minute, go through millions of studies, come up with four or five studies, summarize them for you and hyperlink to them. So now you have all the research you want. And then what I do is I append to that another program called ChatPDF, which is also built into ChatGPT, but there are other programs like this. A lot of times, maybe this is just me, but a lot of this, the peer review studies are way over my head, particularly mathematically. I mean, they're very technical, they're written for PhDs, and I'm just trying to figure out what's your basic, what are your primary findings, what methodology did you use to get there, and how is this useful to financial advisors? So with ChatPDF, all I do is pull up the study, put it in the window, and I ask those questions. What are the primary findings of this study? It spits out the primary findings. How did the researchers get to these findings? What methodology did they use? It tells me, and then it will answer sophisticated questions like, why do you think this would be useful to financial advisors? And it will tell you, and maybe I'll agree or disagree. So those three programs have changed, pretty much changed everything for me in our daily practice, I would say. That's great. Wow, I feel like in speaking or listening to you three, you're, you hold this key to some world of like time management or time-saving abilities, and I love the key. I want access to all these tools. It's so fascinating hearing you talk. So speaking of, I'm trying to keep a running list over here of some of the things you've mentioned that AI can do for financial advisors. So I wrote down task manager, meetings, video, blogs, writing. I'm probably missing some things, but it's really showing me this vast ocean of opportunity that we have with AI and so many different things. So again, kind of want to talk broadly, less specifically about tools, but what the tools are doing in our industry. Specifically, what have you seen that helps most speed up time? What's been time savers for advisors in your experience? And maybe we can start with Justin, since he is currently an advisor. I'd love to hear from you. Yeah. Yeah. No, good, good question. So big time, time constraints have to do with meetings. So AI is definitely helping with that. Even the closest relationship that you may have with a client, there's going to be certain details that the retrieval of those is just going to be naturally quicker and more condensed for an advisor to get that summary. So yeah, that to me, and there's many applications that are new and evolving in that space that are addressing, I think that particular pain point is the preparation and follow-up with client engagements, meetings, phone calls, and so on and so forth. So those are, I'm very excited. The operational side kind of hat of myself has, again, a lot to do with fulfilling tasks much quicker. So back office teams, maybe you've got an assistant, even an application of it, a junior sales assistant, and you've asked them to fulfill this, process this, do that. They may get stuck on a particular step. So how do we speed that up? And they not have to reach out to your red tail or reach out to the senior who's away. So when you can automate these things, provide like a warehouse of your processes, step ones through eight, I'm on step three and stuck, AI can certainly kind of make it easier where they can just kind of turn to that, the most senior operational person on the team and just kind of speed that up. Makes sense. That's great. Anyone else want to add anything before I move on? I think one of the things that, oh, sorry, John. No, no, please. You go first. I talk a lot about, you know, making the importance of making an emotional connection. And part of the problem you alluded to right at the very beginning, when you said, you know, post COVID, well, during COVID, we were all doing just Zoom. There were no more meetings. And post COVID, in my experience, we're still doing an enormous amount of Zoom. People are accustomed to it and they like it. It's convenient. The challenge for advisors is how do I make an emotional connection with the person I'm communicating with when I'm doing it in this somewhat impersonal way? And one of the things that kills an emotional connection is when one person is scrupulously writing every word that's being said and losing that eye contact and that kind of flow of conversation. And so programs like otter.otter.ai, which not only record the whole conversation, but then summarize it, and you can then distribute that, they solve that problem. And I think that's a tremendous advancement. There are a lot of other programs, but that's the area that I think AI, as a practical matter, can be really useful. That makes sense. That's great. John, what were you going to say? I would honestly take a look at what the advisors are currently doing today, right? Where's their biggest time suck, if you will? And that's what you want to focus on. If you're a time suck to, I think, both Justin and Dan's point, if your largest time suck is your meetings capability, right, preparing for a meeting or capturing the notes from a meeting, then there are a variety of tools, like Dan mentioned otter.ai, you could use Fireflies, otter.ai, Fathom, all of those will record a meeting. If you do in-person meetings, and that's a time suck, take a look at something like, there's a really good one called Reflect, where you can write notes, it will capture those notes, and then you can then do searches, like you can, it's integrated with chat GPT. So you can actually do searches based on that as you're capturing the notes. So if you're more of an advisor that you and your CSA come into the room and your CSA takes notes, so you're establishing that personal connection, have the CSA take notes in an AI tool, like Reflect, that then you can use later on to really drill down on what the client was saying. But I think the key that you want to, there's so many tools out there, like I've literally looked at, no kidding, probably over 500 tools. There's just seems to be a new tool every day that kind of catches my eye, and I take a look at it and play with it a bit. And then it either helps me to save time, or I dump it. It's pretty easy. So when we looked at it from the Oasis group, the first thing that I needed to do was clone myself, right? Because I'm on a lot of engagements. We have a dozen people within the firm, but I'm talking to a lot of clients. So the ability for them to capture what I'm saying in a meeting was really impactful. So we used Zoom when we're doing video meetings, and if we're in person, we'll use Reflect, right, to be able to capture that. Then I can just simply focus, and the notes are kind of happening behind me. So just to summarize, there is a lot of technology out there. There's a lot of capability. If you're trying to figure out where do I start and what's going to be most impactful to me, first start with what's your biggest time sign, and then find a tool that works for you around that, and then find your second biggest time suck, and find a tool around that, and then your next one. Dan does a lot of writing, so he's been able to play with a lot of different tools to try that. I don't write as much, so where I use something like Jasper, which is integrated with Grammarly, I agree with you. If you don't use Grammarly, it's a sin. So I use Jasper and Grammarly on my writing, but that's not where I started. I actually started with note-taking and meeting recording, and then I moved. Because I saved time there, I could play around with writing, and I did some of that. So I think that's kind of where you want to look at. Yeah, I appreciate that. You kind of addressed this question that popped up in the Q&A. This advisor is feeling overwhelmed by all the different tools in Dimension 500 that you've looked at, which is just mind-boggling. So I appreciate you saying, you know, figure out what's a problem and how AI could be a solution. Just to kind of reiterate here, what should be a basic AI platform that maybe you think all advisors would find useful and maybe should look into? Is there something that just, you know, you use daily or you see advisors using daily? I would say it's either a chat GPT or like a Jasper. It's something like that. That seems to be used pretty universally across all the advisors that we speak with. So I would say that's an area to start. That being said, it's a tool, right? So you need to invest a bunch of time into it to learn how to use it. The first couple of times, to Dan's point, you're probably going to get a hallucination. It's going to give you some results that you look at and go, that makes no sense to me. Why did I get that result? You have to learn how to prompt it properly to be able to get the right results out of it. So regardless of where you start, chat GPT, a lot of people seem to start there because I think it gets a lot of buzz. I don't know if it's going to be the most impactful for you, but it does get a ton of buzz. You know, I would take a look at what your problem statement is and then find the tool around that problem statement. In fact, you could use chat GPT to look up the tools around that problem statement if you really wanted to. Yeah. Type into chat GPT. I want help managing my tasks. I'm a financial advisor. What AI options are there? It's actually a great idea. Dan, did you want to say something? Yeah, I would kind of second that. I would say the more I use these basic platforms, chat GPT and Claude in my case, the more I use them, the more uses I find for them. And I'm continuously amazed at the breadth of what they, there seems to be nothing they cannot respond to. So I'll just tell you a quick story. I'm very active on LinkedIn, or I posted something recently on LinkedIn. And amongst the replies was somebody who was a kind of a quant and he, he took issue with what I said, but did it in a very technical way that I really did not understand. I, I, I'm not saying he was wrong. I'm just had trouble understanding what he was saying. So I took his response and uploaded it to chat GPT. And I said, is this right? I mean, here's the, here's what we're trying to resolve. Is this a valid point that he's making, or is this just blowing a lot of smoke with fancy language? And chat GPT came back with a very balanced response said, no, he, there's a real merit to what he's saying and explained. I, and I said, my prompt was explained this in lay terms so that anybody could understand this explained it really well, which permitted me to go independently verify it. So the uses that I think what I'd be encouraging people to do is don't be intimidated. It is easy to be intimidated and overwhelmed, but just get started using these programs. And if you need incentive, this is my personal view. There will be two kinds of advisors in the future. Those who are familiar and using artificial intelligence and those who are out of business. That's what that's where I think we're headed. Yeah. I appreciate that. That's, that's helpful. And we shouldn't be afraid that there are a lot of tools, but they're also pretty user-friendly in many cases, as far as I've seen, and they make such a big difference. It's worth the discomfort in trying something new. So we had a couple of questions come into the chat. One was just a comment. He says, Google now has Gemini AI, and you can incorporate it inside the Google suite apps, including email, docs, sheets, et cetera. So if you're on Google, that could be a good thing to look into. Someone's asking about privacy concerns and then note-taking for note-taking AI. We're going to speak a lot more about the compliance side of things, but if someone could just briefly touch on privacy concerns with AI and how you look at that, John, you're nodding your head or Justin, either one of you, if you want to take that. Go ahead, John. I think that's going to be real well. I was going to say, you go first, Justin. So on the AI side, the concern, so you'll notice whenever you use one of these note-takers, it's going to notify everyone in the meeting that you're using AI to take the notes. This is what I'm going to say about the AI. It's gotten significantly better in being able to take notes and summarize. It's not a replacement for your knowledge of what occurred in that meeting. So you need to, if you're going to take those notes and for example, drop them in your CRM, you need to make sure that you've edited them before you put them in your CRM. Definitely, to make sure that the notes captured the sentiment of the conversation properly. The second thing I'll say is, you know, if you are going to do that, you need to have someone who has a compliance mindset, or at least a compliance hat on, right? Because the AI is going to try to interpret, in many cases, what's being said in the meeting. And we have some real regulatory guardrails around what we can and cannot say in a meeting. And you need to make sure that you're editing what AI has put into place so that you're not going to put yourself in jeopardy because AI interpreted something as a guarantee or anything along those lines that you are not intending in the meeting. So from a compliance perspective, you know, in every state, we can thank a lot of folks from Boston and New York for this. But in every state, if you're recording a conversation, you need to tell them you're recording a conversation. And that's why all the tools do this. So I would just make sure you're editing. Justin? Yeah. Appreciate that. Go ahead, Justin. No, I think you did a nice job with that, John. You know, as, you know, in our industry, you know, client-sensitive information is, of course, always going to be highly scrutinized, and you can't control when, on a meeting, the client tells you something, you know, private and confidential that is now being recorded and where is it going to live, you know, who takes the steps to make sure that it's preserved and so on and so forth. So very valid question to echo John's comments. It continues to improve in those areas, and, you know, as compliance teams, you know, get their arms around that and build policies around that, that will help to continue to mitigate. Yeah. Appreciate that. Kind of along these same lines, these tools can be so helpful in AI, but sometimes they could actually be costing us additional time if we're maybe not using them correctly or we're not, you know, yeah, if you say something in a meeting, for example, you know, you tell them to invest X amount of dollars and it gets the number wrong, that's kind of a red flag, right? So how can we avoid the pitfall of these tools actually costing us time and needing to be, you know, scraped through to make sure they're correct? If you want to answer first, Justin, that'd be great, and we can move on, but. Yeah, exactly. And I think it was touched upon earlier about prompting, you know, so providing context. So the more work that you put on the front end to provide that context and the specific instructions, I didn't think Dan even mentioned, he's providing examples, good examples. So the more that you do that on the front end, the more that you're, you know, on the back end, you know, you're limiting the amount of time editing. So that's going to be a big one. So if you just kind of shoot from the hip and throw something out there in your chat GPT, you know, you're going to spend a lot more time editing something and maybe causing headaches with your compliance department pushing through a marketing blog than what you would have if you maybe wrote it yourself or spent some time on the front end. So you know, other things where, you know, come into play as well as, you know, when it comes to the planning process, you know, the accuracy of the information is vital, right? So, you know, choosing the right tool in this case and vetting that through is important. Absolutely. Just my personal experience too with this is chat GPT is great. It can be a great resource, knowledge, asking questions. But I think what we're getting at here is you need to, as you practice, you'll figure out what questions are more appropriate than others. For example, I asked something about inherited IRAs. Well, in 2022, I believe, 2021, one of those inherited IRA rules changed a bit. And so you need to be making sure, you know, I think I was using chat GPT is only at that time was only cut information through 2021. And so just vetting these tools to make sure that the information we're getting is accurate, I think it's important. So appreciate that. I didn't even have any further comments before we move on or on how these tools could cost us time and how to avoid that. Yeah. I would say this because I'm probably the least technical of our group here. So for me, it's difficult to get acquainted with a new program. And I think realistically, you have to be prepared to go backwards before you go forwards. Like right before I was speaking with you, I was playing with a new something that just came out today, or at least I just learned about it. A new website program where it's like text to website, put in a couple of sentences, it will create a website. Well, it's not quite that simple. I mean, there's a lot, there are a lot of rules around the program that you have to get comfortable with, you know, how to do it. But I would say that our team is going to spend time doing that because we know that while it's going to be a time suck initially, it's going to save us an enormous amount of time down the road. So I would say just recognize that there is a time commitment and it's not necessarily intuitive, and be prepared to spend the time, the payoff is definitely worth it. Absolutely. We had someone comment, don't sell yourself short, Dan. You are in the cutting edge and ahead of many of us, I have to agree, been very impressive. So that was a nice thing to say. John, did you want to add anything? No, I think Dan and Justin really kind of covered it, right? Take the time to learn it, that's all. Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned earlier, I have a running list here of different ways that AI can be employed in financial advice. I want to touch on a couple more areas. So can we talk about, and we'll start with John, can we talk about scheduling or calendaring tools? AI jumped into this space, what does that look like? We don't use anything on the calendar side because quite frankly, there are quite a few out there, right? There's some that will help to organize your calendar, to find blank spaces in your calendar, to create tasks for you and put them in your calendar. To be very frank with you, those stress me out. I can't have like a million tasks out there, I'm a prioritization person. So that's a great example of know the business process I'm trying to solve for. That's not one of them that would add stress to me and probably add time to my life. So we don't use anything like that, but I'm a big podcast listener, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Another one that I like really a lot is SnipD. When you're listening to a podcast, you can basically, SnipD runs on your phone, you can turn it on, it will snip the podcast that you're listening to, it'll snip the portion of the podcast you're listening to, it'll transcribe that, and then you can feed that into like a Jasper or a chat GPT and be able to do more research on it. So that's, for me, that's a huge time savings, right? Because there's a lot of times where I'm listening to a podcast, like, oh, that'd be really interesting. Instead of me trying to jot it down on a piece of paper that's sitting in my pocket, I can just use SnipD and then I don't have to worry about it. And it's great. And it will help me to remember that piece of the podcast. So I can look it up later for like my newsletter or something like that. So yeah, I would come back to the find the problem statement you're trying to solve for, and then you're going to find a really good tool to solve for that. Yeah, that makes sense. Justin, have you seen any length or advances in the scheduling calendaring space? Yeah, advances, you know, with incorporating AI, you know, we don't use AI with kind of our standard Calendly or bookings, depending on what we have. So, you know, we do use some automation that does, you know, connect so many books, you know, like many of us today, we open up our calendars through a Calendly link. So from there, I can definitely attach some AI. But yeah, the calendar tools we're not currently using. Okay, cool. So that makes sense. It's maybe not the most necessary space at the moment for AI. And unless Dan, you had a comment, I want to ask a little bit more about another area. But yeah, I will say just quickly, we use a program called Dubsado, which isn't just for calendars. But that, again, has completely changed our practice. You make an inquiry of our firm, you're going to get an automatic, you're going to get something that's going to say book an appointment with Dan and click and it books the appointment, then it sends you a Zoom link automatically, then it sends you reminders automatically. We do nothing between the time you make the inquiry. We do nothing manually until I meet you on the appointed date and time. It's all automated. So I don't see a lot of people using Dubsado. I'm not sure why. I don't think it's that popular with financial advisors. But for us, we run our entire practice off Dubsado. Very cool. That's good to know. It does exist and it can be helpful, sounds like. So just to kind of recap on my list here, I've got some that Dan talked about, calendar, AI tool. We've talked about chat GPT quite a bit, which I've used a lot to help me write emails. I'll write out an email and say, make this more concise, make it more professional. Task managers, meetings, both for meeting prep and it sounds like meeting recording, if I'm hearing you correctly, videos for marketing, blogs for marketing, writing in general, blogs and so forth. What are we missing on this list that we've talked a lot about the importance of finding your pain point, but there could be quite a few. So are we missing any pain points that we see commonly in the advisor space that they should look into tools to kind of help? So I think what I see coming down the road is increasing personalization of chatbots. And I think there's a whole science that is called effective computing, AFFECTIVE, which is the study, the way I understand effective computing is it's how can we make AI more like a human conveying human emotions, empathy, sensitivity, thoughtfulness, self-awareness. And the studies I've been looking at on how effective chatbots are in the therapeutic setting and in relieving chronic pain, there's another study on that. And I think advisors are going to have to become very familiar with these technologies because that's really does pose an existential threat to a portion of your practice. Not everybody is going to be comfortable dealing with a bot no matter how sophisticated it is, but a significant number of people, when they look at fees and look at what they can save, I think it's important for advisors to be aware of what's coming down the road. Just Google effective computing and you will see that AI is very much headed into providing the human touch that advisors are comfortable saying, I don't have to worry about AI because it'll never replace me because it can't replace a human. There are a lot of people at MIT and elsewhere working to prove you wrong. That's great. Love your thoughts about that because I think it is a common sentiment that, oh, I don't need to adopt this because I can't be replaced. And I'm not saying that you can be replaced, but there are certain things that you do that can be replaced. And so I think we need to be wary of that. Justin and John, any thoughts from you on other areas that we should be looking at as advisors? Justin, you want me to go first? Well, we haven't really mentioned some of the applications that directly impact what we do in terms of advice. I'm biased because one of the applications I'm an advisor with is addressing the planning problem. The amount of time goes into creating financial plans. Can we streamline that? So hours and hours go into gathering documents, formatting data, putting it into the right place. And then even after you got it done, of course, there's always hours of the manipulation of different proposals with that. So cutting down on the advice piece on that, Paraplanar AI on the Kitson's map, they're another one that does a great job of doing that. We've been working with that team for a while and others that are doing something similar like what they're doing with extra advice, we'll call it, over at FP Alpha where they're addressing insurance, tax planning, estate planning. So, you know, the advice piece of that just kind of really speeding up that whole world. Well, thank you so much. Those are huge pain points when writing them down here because they're pain points I experienced too. So those are helpful to know that there may be some resources in that space. John, what did you have to add? Yeah, I would add a couple more applications. I mean, there are a lot of applications that are focused on next best action, right? So when you get a client that gives you a call, what's the next best thing you can talk with them about or the next three things you can talk with them about? You look at companies like Forward Lane or Bento Engine or Intergen Data that are mining huge, vast amounts of data and distilling that down. In Bento Engine's case, it's by life events. In Intergen Data's case, it's based on, you know, the propensity for you to have a disease or to have a health issue. Then when you think of Forward Lane, it's mining CRM data to come up with next best action. So those are three really good examples. To Dan's point a moment ago, you look at some of the chat capabilities that folks like CogniCore are developing, right? Where it's going to be able to answer really kind of a lot of the mundane questions you'll get. Like, for example, what's the current position on a stock today? Or what do I have left in my 401k for this year to take as a distribution? Or what's my balance at this point? Lots of little questions that will just heighten the client experience and make you more sticky with the client because you can generate those answers very quickly for them and meet them where they are, right? When you think of next gen clients, most of them want to be able to chat a question to you and get an answer. They don't necessarily want to pick up the phone and talk with you about it and they certainly don't want to schedule a meeting. They just want the answer right then because that's when they had the question. So that chat capability I think is going to be a game changer for a lot of practices. You're going to watch the larger firms roll that out first, which is actually going to put a lot of pressure on the independent REA channel because if they're not familiar with these tools or they're not looking at how they can compete in this space, they're going to get passed by like Dan was mentioning earlier because larger firms are going to invest in this. Yeah, absolutely. It's very helpful. There's so many spaces now where AI is. We've talked a lot about that. This is our final question before we need to wrap up, but someone's asking about AI programs that help with risk profiles for clients and do we know of any technologies that address that? I don't know of any yet, but keep your eye on what's happening over at Lion and Nitrogen. Hey, great, great. Good to know. Justin, did you have anything? Yeah, Nitrogen being kind of the foremost in that. Well, I use that list, but others may use that. I would imagine that there will be some standalone applications like that, but I know that's very common in the robo world already, right, with like Tiffin. So we're using risk profiles to match to a portfolio. So standalone applications to advisor world, manage your own portfolios, use outside money managers, et cetera. Just a matter of time. Yeah, absolutely. Well, appreciate so much everyone's time today, especially our wonderful panelists for opening our eyes to all the opportunities that exist with technology and the way it's going. And they're such great resources. So I feel really privileged I've been able to take an hour of your time and learn from you. So appreciate you. The next time we'll have an AI webinar is on April 24th, and we will also add a couple of resources. We'll get the resources to those who are watching today. I'm hoping we can kind of get a list of the technologies we discussed. It's quite overwhelming as we've mentioned, but just try them out, test them out. There can't really be harm in trying something new. So try and get that to all of our listeners. But thank you again, everyone for coming. Thanks for those who asked questions and make sure to take the survey once we're done here in Zoom. Thank you so much.

financial advisors

AI tools

Chat GPT

Jasper AI

Grammarly

Consensus.AI

ChatPDF

automating client engagements

streamlining financial planning processes